Flash in the Pan: Life and Death of an American Restaurant

SMOKING

PART ONE

HAVE YOU MET MISS JONES?

ONE

Monday, March 4, 1991, 7:15 P.M. The war is over. War is not healthy for restaurants and other living things. But The Falls has survived.

And tonight . . . tonight is going to be hot.

Danny Aiello is coming. He is going to be here any minute for dinner. A table is being held.

Danny Aiello is tonight’s featured performer in the Lush Life Lounge. Otherwise known, to whomever it is known, as The Falls. Recently the place has taken to calling itself the Lush Life Lounge on Monday and Tuesday nights, because when The Falls was just calling itself The Falls on those nights, it was damn lucky if it got twenty customers for dinner all night. It is named for an old John Coltrane tune. It probably ought to be called the Last Ditch Lounge, since Aiello’s appearance on the marquee (actually there is no marquee; hell, there isn’t even a sign out front!) tonight comes at a moment of complete and total desperation—a final, wildly chaotic effort to inject new life into a restaurant that has just passed its first birthday, but hovers constantly near death.

A commercial storage facility has just opened up across the street. They are no doubt counting on some business from The Falls. Maybe they’ve noticed how goddamned dark it is inside there; is it to save electricity, or to make it look more like a wake? How about calling it the Lack of Life Lounge? The Lust for Life Lounge? One of the owners was moping around a few hours ago, talking about turning the entire place into a strip joint. That would presumably be called, simply, the Lush Lounge. If the Grim Reaper called for a table tonight—not so farfetched a possibility, really, not in New York City in the 1990s—they’d give him the corner banquette, ply him with free champagne and hope for the best.

Aiello shares a Sinatra obsession with The Falls; so it was discovered by Bruce Goldstein, the restaurant’s proprietor, who heard Aiello sing Sinatra in his movie, Once Around, one night when he probably should have been at work. The actor has been convinced by others, including Once Around producer Griffin Dunne, a pal of the management, to take the stage in a benefit. We are told the cause is a Bronx Catholic rest home, but if it saves the life of a trendy downtown restaurant gasping its final breath, surely the nuns won’t complain.

What is truly amazing about tonight is how, on the verge of catastrophe, The Falls is alive at all.

These days The Falls is getting five letters a day from its neighborhood bank. None of them are invitations to a cocktail party.

The venetian blinds look like they could use a dusting; so could that hot pink neon bulb that circles the window panels and gives off a cheesy afterglow. Even those overhead art deco light fixtures, four of them, hanging over the room like missiles, seem aimed directly at this restaurant’s heart. They point downward, those monstrous lights, and even through the dust they cast a luscious hue—though they never stop looking like they’re about to crash directly into the table below.

At least the waitresses look good. Human beings like to keep themselves dusted. Tonight it’s a gathering of Falls Stars, a constellation of beauties in tight black miniskirts, bending, touching, stroking, leaning. Only hot lookers need apply. Why the hell not? They go well with the place. Since opening night, it has been the firm policy of The Falls to have a Firm Policy. If someone is going to serve me the wrong order, an owner of The Falls said once, I’d rather get the wrong order from a pretty girl than a fat guy. The waitresses oblige this sexism, or maybe it’s just the recession and they need the money. One of them likes to keep two pens planted firmly between her breasts; is that so we will look at her breasts, or so that we won’t?

Hundreds of hours of jazz and pop standards sit on a shelf behind the bar, back where Bruce Goldstein likes to spend most of his nights, and it is a strict Goldstein rule that music be played at all times, no exceptions. Tonight we are hearing a preponderance of Sinatra, in anticipation of the arrival of many Italians, including an actual friend of Sinatra named Jilly Rizzo, who used to own a 52nd Street jazz joint named Jilly’s. Yes, Jilly is coming tonight, and he will want to hear Sinatra being played on the sound system. Jilly has a decided preference for the works of Sinatra.

So it is now 7:15 on an otherwise deadly quiet night in early March in the Year We Won the Persian Gulf War. No one was murdered in New York City on this night, not even an innocent by-stander.

The Falls is open for business.

And tonight . . . tonight is going to be hot.

/Hot nights come and go in the life of anyone, anything. The Falls has proved to be no exception. We are here, a few days into its second year of life, marveling at its defiance of the laws of business. By those laws, this restaurant should already be dead. And yet, when its first birthday went by a few nights ago, the blessed event did not warrant so much as a candle. (Odd, isn’t it, when you consider what horrors most restaurants inflict when it’s your birthday?)

Restaurants are not, either in the traditional or metaphorical sense, conceived or born. A seed is not planted and allowed to grow. There is no wonderful, charmed period where they come into the world all wrinkly and cute and cuddly. Friends and relatives do not make pilgrimages with little gift-wrapped presents to a restaurant upon the announcement of its birth.

Restaurants, alas, come to life fully formed, ready to deteriorate and wither away almost instantly. They must, from the day they face the world for the first time, act mature and sophisticated and wise. Frankly, it’s a lot to ask of anything, even an institution—and maybe that is the reason we are dealing here with a perilously fragile enterprise that is, perhaps, analogous to nothing. A moribund movie lives on in the video store, passed over thousands of times by discriminating renters; a novel gathers dust on a library shelf, a burial ground for obscure chapters in our culture. No such luck for restaurants. They live and then they die. They get no funeral plots or obituaries. There’s no place to put a wreath, or page to place a black-bordered announcement.

Depressing, isn’t it?

Which is why it is impossible to review the events on this particular corner of the earth—the corner of Varick and Vandam streets in lower Manhattan, a corner not known even to the vast majority of New York City cabdrivers let alone the nearly four billion people on this planet—without thinking about death.

Restaurants are not only mere mortals, but they suffer an infant mortality rate that—in human terms—would lead to the immediate end of civilization. Only one in four restaurants in New York City makes it past its fifth birthday.

Imagine! Would you have a baby if you knew it would be dead within five years? Forget human comparisons; would you start a business facing those daunting odds? Invest money? Place a bet? Is there anything in the world, really, that you would do if you thought that it had a 75 percent chance of failure within five years? Some people—were they to be told that they themselves had a 75 percent chance of dying within five years—would probably lock themselves in a garage with their car engine running.

But other people thrive on the very threat of failure that others find so daunting.

Dances With Wolves. Anybody wanna see a three-hour movie about Indians? Apparently so. The Gulf War. Big risk. Turned out to be a pretty damn successful idea.

It would make for a simple explanation to suggest that in the fall of 1989, nearly two years before Danny Aiello took the stage at the Lush Life Lounge, we lived in a more hopeful time—and that when Bruce Goldstein first pushed forward with the idea for The Falls, he managed to tap into the positive vibes of the late 1980s, the burgeoning affluence of the postwar baby boom generation that still had money to spend. Sure, the market had crashed—but that was two years before, we’d all had some time to get our shit together. We stopped taking drugs, didn’t we? Think of how much money we saved right there! In the late 1980s we became, as one wise member of this generation recently put it, drugless home addicts—doomed to covet apartments and houses larger than our own. We could no longer stop ourselves from marching into banks and requesting loans, loans, more loans; we mortgaged ourselves.

For what? For an apartment with a view of a filthy river called the Hudson? For a house with a pleasant yard and a quality school system? For convenient access to a grocery store that charges $8 for a six-pack of beer, and a dry cleaner that gets $4 to press your pants?

But it’s not that simple. Never is.

/We all know where babies are conceived.

In case you were wondering about restaurants, they are conceived in the mind.

It was the summer of 1989, and Bruce Goldstein was only just recovered from the death of a loved one, a restaurant that defied all odds and lived from 1978 to 1988, yes, an entire decade, making it by industry standards a miracle. A thriving restaurant! Its name was Central Falls; and The Falls got its name from that illustrious predecessor.

But The Falls is not what Bruce Goldstein would have called his new restaurant had it been his decision. It never is when Other People’s Money is involved.

It would have been called Miss Jones. Not Miss Jones Café. Not Miss Jones’s Place. Certainly not Ms. Jones.

It seems that Bruce was driving along the highway from the luxurious beachfront community of Sag Harbor, about three hours from New York, after a weekend of summer sun. His skin was dark; his mind was wandering. As always, Bruce was thinking, mostly about the new restaurant he had been saying he might want to start. He popped a Bobby Short tape into the tape deck, and hummed along with one of his favorite nightclub crooners.

Suddenly, as in stop-the-car-I-gotta-make-an-important-call suddenly, Bruce had it. The name.

Have you met Miss Jones? Bobby Short was singing.

Miss Jones! What a great name for a restaurant! Full-blown fantasies projected themselves in Bruce’s mind. He saw a beautiful, glamorous, rich, sexy couple. Probably in black tie. They were stepping into a taxi. We’re going to Miss Jones, the handsome young man instructed the driver. Without hesitation the cabbie drove off in the direction of Varick and Vandam.

I’ve got it, Bruce thought. People will drink champagne out of ruby slippers. Bobby Short will sing, models will dance, everyone will eat. Yes! Miss Jones it is!

Hmmmm, Terry Quinn said.

Bruce had, indeed, pulled off to the side of the busy highway, found a phone and called his partner on their new, unformed restaurant idea. This is what happens when you have a partner. You call him up with your epiphanies.

I’m not sure I get it, Terry Quinn continued.

What is Terry talking about? Bruce cannot believe that he doesn’t get it. It’s perfect. It’s got mystery . . . romance . . . style. Hell, I want to eat at Miss Jones. I want to say Miss Jones. I want to know her, to have her . . . she is my mystery woman.

Nobody will know what it is, Terry Quinn said.

It’s a restaurant! Miss Jones is an idea . . . and I will plant that idea in their minds. They will want to come visit Miss Jones. They will become obsessed with her, as I have. They will keep coming back, coming back, coming back . . . oh, it will be wonderful.

It’s too confusing, Terry Quinn said.

Too confusing? Two words? Come on, man! Miss Jones is the answer to so many questions in my life, the answer to so many problems. I know it will work. I am not wrong about this, believe me.

You’re crazy, Terry Quinn said. Goodbye.

Bruce Goldstein got back in his car. Okay, so I’m crazy. But it’s a great name for a restaurant.

VARICK AND VANDAM

TWO

You know your life is devoted to restaurants when you are eighteen years old and you want to work in Rose’s Restaurant on Cape Cod for the summer and they’ll never hire anyone under twenty-one because they serve liquor. So you go in with your phony ID card that says your name is Joe Rose. They look at you kinda funny but they figure, why would he lie? And they give you the job and it works out great and you’re learning the ropes and you know this is what you want to do, you know it so much that one day, when your mother wants to visit you at your restaurant, you say, okay Mom, but you’ll have to be Mrs. Rose.

That’s the way it was for Bruce Goldstein. All his life. Getting ahead, telling a story, making it work. He spent most of his early years in Rhode Island working relentlessly toward his goal. After he got out of high school in the Providence suburb of Pawtucket—where the yearbook predicted Bruce Goldstein would become a swanky nightclub owner—and a year at the University of Rhode Island, he moved to Boston. There, during every spare minute, he worked to fulfill his yearbook prophecy in restaurants and bars. Daisy Buchanan’s on Newbury Street; The Kenmore Club on Kenmore Square. First he went to Bentley School of Accounting and Finance, then to Suffolk University, where he got a degree and even spent a year going to business school.

But at heart Bruce was a kid from Rhode Island and he wanted to go home. When Bruce was growing up, his dad—whose nickname was Goldie, and whom Bruce now describes as a Jewish gangster—owned a few private gaming clubs and was suspected of bookmaking on the side. Bruce remembers being a little boy and having the police raid his house, looking for evidence that his dad was a bookie. When Bruce was twenty-three his father died; so he left Boston and went back home. It was 1970 in America and for a young man on the make, that often meant the music business. For a couple years he promoted concerts and did pretty well. But he wanted back into restaurants. He figured out the best place in Providence for a restaurant and he got the money—earned some, borrowed some; it’s always the same—and he just did it. He met a man named Morris Nathanson, a designer who looks exactly like Mark Twain, who helped him put it together, and who became a lifelong friend.

And so, by the time Bruce was twenty-four, he’d gotten himself his first place, called the Incredible Organ, and what people remember about it was that Bruce thought up the idea of a trolley car that would bring people right to the door of the restaurant from wherever they were. Location, location, location!

But after a while Bruce wanted a trolley car to take him out of Rhode Island. He didn’t like being a big fish in a little pond. He loved his mother and Carol, his sister, and his sense of family is strong; so that was the tough part about leaving. But he knew he had to. He wanted to go somewhere pretty and nice. He took his Incredible Organ profits—must have been $50,000 or so—and went to the Caribbean. First to St. Martin, then to St. Bart’s, and in these glamorous French resorts he wheeled and dealed till he had himself restaurants; in all, five successful places that catered to tourists and locals and anyone looking for a meal. They were packed from the moment he started them. Bruce began to believe he had the magic touch.

For almost a decade Bruce remained there—a man with a tan and a plan. He knew it didn’t take much to get a couple of beachfront joints together. Sure they were nice, his pal Morris came down to help him with the decor; but there were other fish to be fried, so to speak.

So one day in 1977 he sold all his interests in the Caribbean and walked away with more than $200,000 in profit, and came to New York. He got himself an apartment and immediately had visions of restaurants; maybe one could go right here on Union Square—right across from his new bachelor pad. But eventually he found his way to new neighborhoods and new vistas, and discovered new opportunities waiting wherever he looked. This was the 1970s, after all, and he had a six-figure bank account.

Thus, in 1978, Central Falls was born, with the design of old friend Morris Nathanson, and the irrepressible spirit of Bruce Goldstein.

Central Falls struggled through the first several months, but by the end of the first year had become a hit—a restaurant and watering hole for the rapidly growing population of a New York neighborhood just beginning to prosper at the end of the 1970s: SoHo.

Technically it means South of Houston Street, but SoHo means much more than that. For a decade it was the undisputed center of the New York art world; as home to galleries owned by prominent dealers like Mary Boone and Holly Solomon and Leo Castelli, it was where you could go on a Sunday afternoon and find a large piece of black metal, what it was exactly no one knew, that cost $20,000. Artists like Vito Acconci, famous for having masturbated for hours in a gallery, would show his work in SoHo. So too would more conventional painters like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

If SoHo were a microcosm of New York City, then its Fifth Avenue would be a two-lane, ten-block boulevard called West Broadway. If, on a Sunday afternoon in 1982, you wanted to spend a few lazy hours gallery hopping in SoHo, you started and finished on West Broadway. What it lacked in outer beauty it made up for in a vibrant inner world. It seemed as though every nondescript four-story loft building had five or six galleries, each with its own distinct vision. You would ride in a cavernous elevator or march up wide, dark stairs, and discover a world of modern art that you could actually buy. It was the world Woody Allen portrayed almost without parody in Hannah and Her Sisters; painters like Max von Sydow were refusing to sell canvases according to size and color, but collectors like Daniel Stern were still going to take a limo down there and try.

If you were visiting, or if you were lucky enough to actually live right along the cutting edge of American modern art—either way you needed a place to eat. And Bruce Goldstein had just such a place. The amazing thing about Central Falls, at 478 West Broadway, was that it practically preceded the SoHo boom; it opened in September of 1978, and from the day it opened, Central Falls had it. Location, location, location!

But by 1989, Central Falls had closed, the victim of rapidly rising rents—his had climbed from $2,200 a month in 1978 to $18,000 a decade later—and a gradually declining economy.

Bruce Goldstein retreated to the shadows. Having declared bankruptcy—enabling him to escape without having to pay several outstanding bills from food purveyors—he didn’t see the point in remaining. So he went back to the Caribbean for a while, which is where he had his first serious conversation with a friend of Central Falls regular Matt Dillon, a very nice guy named Terry Quinn.

/You get used to crowded rooms when you grow up with nine brothers and three sisters, and the nine brothers and you all sleep in the same bedroom, doubled up in beds and fighting and giggling and all that stuff. That’s how Terry Quinn grew up, and if he seems exceedingly comfortable working a crowded room, that’s because he is. They grew up in a small house in Brooklyn, and Terry commuted to Catholic schools, first in Brooklyn, then in other parts of New York; one in Queens, then, after he got thrown out of that one, a place called La Salle on Second Avenue in Manhattan. La Salle specialized in Catholic kids who got thrown out.

Terry spent a lot of those years reading all kinds of magazines. He loved to read articles about guys who came up from nowhere and made it big. Not guys who got success handed to them on a plate, like movie stars; more like businessmen and entrepreneurs, men who had an idea and made it work, and made lots of money, too. He knew he wanted to be that kind of guy, the kind that got written up in magazines; he liked the pictures, too. To this day he keeps a large collection of private shots of himself on the beach here and there with Matt Dillon and other friends, cavorting.

He graduated from high school, finally, a football star with no particular ambitions. He went to St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, but by the time he was twenty he was married and had to drop out. By the time he was twenty-two, he had two sons. He found his family a nice, small apartment in Queens, rent-controlled, for $200 a month, and worked a variety of odd jobs that got him enough money to buy a car. He needed a lot more, though, he knew that. In 1982, after his second son was born, he took the civil service exam to become a fireman. He passed, but it was going to be a while before he got on the city payroll; in those days, he says, They were trying to hire mostly women. A guy didn’t have much of a chance.

So he decided to tackle Wall Street. A few of his brothers had already made the plunge into the world of money, and they brought him into it. He found it exciting—and he had enough of an aptitude to have passed the stockbroker licensing exam on his first try in 1985. But the more time he spent around money, the more he wanted to earn it for himself. He was working for a Wall Street brokerage house when part of it moved to the corner of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, the center of the universe for a young man on the way up in the world of money, fashion and power. He’d stayed friends with a boyhood pal, Patrick Fahey, who now worked in that neighborhood as a fashion model—and together they scanned the city for opportunities.

"I’d read in Interview magazine about those outlaw parties that happened in the streets. By word of mouth, or by phone calls, someone would get a crowd of people on the street, on the West Side, get a deserted street in a commercial area, and a truck would pull up and serve drinks and stuff. People would gather. I went to one or two. The cops would always come and break them up. It gave me the idea. With word of mouth I could gather a bunch of people, too."

So Terry and Patrick scanned the classifieds for the right kind of space to open a nightclub—one that would appeal to the young crowd of actors and models that Terry and Patrick now counted as their friends. Finally, through The New York Times, they found a space in Greenwich Village, an Israeli restaurant that had just gone under, and they knew it would be just right. Some girl had lent us money, Terry says. I had not a cent. I was living paycheck to paycheck, no matter what I was doing. It wasn’t enough. She lent Patrick and Terry each $15,000, and another investor borrowed $40,000 to make up the rest of what they needed. They named it Peggy Sue’s, though not after the movie or the song. I thought a woman’s name was good luck, he explains.

Peggy Sue’s took off; but right as that happened, the Fire Department phoned. They had a job.

So Terry went to work as a fireman.

He was probably the only fireman in New York City who also owned a trendy Manhattan nightspot on the side.

It was right around this time that Terry separated from his wife, and began living in a lovely West Village walk-up.

It was at Peggy Sue’s that Terry first discovered models and movie stars, the formula for a club’s success, not to mention his own.

I knew them personally. I knew all the girl models and I knew guy models. You meet more and more, you meet the bookers, and they want to know the people who own the clubs because they want to be taken care of. It’s a circle. They want to know you, and you want to know their girls. And they’re always bringing whoever’s new in town. There’s always new young girls coming in. And they’re all twenty years old, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. And that’s what makes a crowd.

The formula for a successful New York nightspot is simple: If a beautiful girl comes up to the velvet rope, you let her in immediately.

Right away, Terry says. "I don’t think any club will ever leave beautiful girls standing outside. I was buying bottles of champagne for some of these girls. Six or seven beautiful girls can keep a hundred guys. It’ll keep me in a place. Seven beautiful girls. They never do think about being used . . . they’re too young, or not that smart. They don’t really think about it. They get jaded after two years and then they don’t go out anymore. You don’t see ’em around. They get hooked up with some famous actor or musician, a wealthy guy, a banker or something, and they disappear into the sunset.

And then the new ones come along and take their place.

/In 1989, as Peggy Sue’s grew more successful, Terry Quinn and Matt Dillon looked inside the window of a restaurant named La Gamelle. It doesn’t exist anymore, now it’s a hot joint called Lucky Strike, but at the time it was for sale and Terry was thinking of buying it and maybe getting into the restaurant business. It wasn’t a very nice place, though, at least not at that time. It had one big problem, something about raw sewage coming out into the street. Not good for a restaurant.

As they stared into the window, Matt said to Terry, You should get together with Bruce.

So they went to St. Bart’s and they kicked back a few and became friends and decided to open a restaurant.

They came back to Manhattan and combed the city together. They looked at a place on 13th Street, off Sixth Avenue. They looked at a place on Avenue A. It had to be cheap, of course. Very cheap.

The best place they saw was a restaurant on Varick Street that had seen better days: J.S. VanDam. Both Bruce and Terry had been there as customers, and each remembered it as the darkest restaurant they’d ever seen. I didn’t like anybody in there, Terry says. People have these fond memories of the place, but I think it was drug induced. It was a place to drink and do coke. But as Terry and Bruce and Matt continued their search of Manhattan, their minds kept coming back to it, and to the mysterious magic that once lured crowds to the corner of Varick and Vandam.

Varick Street is a one-way, three-lane downtown thoroughfare used mostly by traffic headed to the Holland Tunnel and New Jersey. Pedestrians keep their distance, especially at night. The street has been there since the 1700s, named for Richard Varick, an early mayor of New York. Vandam is a short side street best known to New Yorkers as the home, until recently, of the Thalia SoHo repertory theater. The spot now for sale had always been a restaurant; for more than two decades before J.S. VanDam it was Villa Varick, a cheap neighborhood hangout where a chicken dinner cost $3 and beers were a quarter. Before that—when the space first opened in the 1940s—it had possibly been a private gambling club, with dark curtains protecting its customers from the authorities and the street.

The J.S. in J.S. VanDam stood for Jim and Susan, two waiters at Raoul’s, a nearby French bistro that had been popular for years. But Susan had died a year ago, and Jim had put the place on the market. It did have one major advantage: the room itself. It was large, almost cavernous; extremely high ceilings; a corner location with lots of windows; right on a major downtown thoroughfare; and, most important, one of the longest, finest bars in New York City. I thought that it was the perfect space, Terry says now.

After much haggling—matters became more complicated when the VanDam owner declared bankruptcy—Bruce and Terry negotiated a rent of $5,416.67 a month. Armed with a deal, Terry and Bruce cemented their relationship into a company called 150 Varick Inc. Terry Quinn was its president.

A friendship had become a partnership.

I got to know him better, Terry later said of those months. "After we first met we went out a lot. I’m a pretty good judge of character. I knew that you have to sacrifice some things for other things. No partnership is going to be perfect, no person you’re going to find is going to be the perfect guy, deaf and dumb, he does all the work for you. Bruce was the best at paying attention to a lot of the small details. He had better taste than most restaurateurs. Better taste in music. He’s obsessed with music . . . I think it’s one of the things that makes the place. The music and the lighting . . .

He’s got a lot of experience, Bruce. He’s an older guy, he’s been around, he’s done restaurants all over the place. It’s hard to find people that have that kind of taste. The knowledge of how to work things out. He doesn’t pay attention to the accounting, things like that, but he knows how to work things out.

MISS JONES

THREE

Somewhere a man is melting.

This man thinks that Kimberly Jones finds him attractive, or interesting. And this is exciting news, because Kimberly Jones is attractive and interesting herself. She is turning up the volume on her lilting Arkansas twang, and the gentleman in question falls completely. He is a total sucker for a twang. And so Kimberly—not Kim—Jones brushes her bangs off her forehead, laughs and continues the meltdown.

She parts her hair on the side—thin, wavy brown hair, often pulled back, sometimes left unwashed. That is the only part of her physical appearance that would occasionally not be described as well scrubbed, which is her calling card. She dresses demurely. She walks demurely. At least for an Arkansas girl who used to write restaurant reviews about Italian joints she thinks were run by mobsters in the witness protection program, or else why would they be so good?

She came to work for Bruce Goldstein in June of 1989. She met a man at the Ambassador East Hotel in Chicago who suggested it. They met in the hallway or the elevator or something. It was a food convention. The next thing she knew she was getting off a plane at Kennedy Airport with two apple pies she had